Stephen Donnelly no longer the accidental politician

Stephen Donnelly has always defined himself as something of an accidental politician, encouraged to run for the Dáil at the last minute in 2011 because he felt a responsibility to do something to help his country in its hour of need.

No doubt he is still similarly motivated but on Thursday he demonstrated that he’s a professional politician now. He aims for power and office. His decision to join Fianna Fáil suggests that he believes the party will be in government after the next election.

Though in reality, the innocent phase in Donnelly’s political life ended long before now.

From being an ingénue fond of telling people that he didn’t know how “this place” (as he referred to Leinster House ) worked, he has become an adept media performer and a skilful political operator.

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Leaders’ debate

Indeed, such was Donnelly’s media profile, that Fianna Fáil once complained to RTÉ that he – one Independent TD – had been on its current affairs shows far more than the entire Fianna Fáil party.

During the last Dáil, as emerging alternative political forces and groupings circled each other, jostling for pre-eminence and recruits, Donnelly agonised about joining Shane Ross’s Independent Alliance. Lucinda Creighton at one stage thought he would join her Renua party.

In the end, Donnelly founded the Social Democrats with Róisín Shortall and Catherine Murphy. It flared briefly, and Donnelly’s impressive performance in the leaders’ television debate [despite some policy holes] encouraged its members to believe they were on the cusp of a breakthrough.

But the structure of Irish politics makes it hard to make that breakthrough, and ultimately the new party returned to the Dáil with the same three seats of its co-leaders that it had brought into the election. Donnelly thought they should talk about entering government; his co-leaders demurred. From then on, relations deteriorated.

Coup

According to the new Fianna Fáil TD, people in his Wicklow constituency have been urging him to join a party, and most of them, he says, thought it should be Fianna Fáil. If this seems a little hard to believe, Donnelly insisted upon it with some conviction. Perhaps he will fit in just fine.

It is a coup for Fianna Fáil and Micheál Martin could scarcely keep the smile off his face at the press conference. Even the top rank of the party’s frontbenchers, who know that the number of cabinet jobs available to them after the next election (if they’re in government, that is) has been reduced by one, shrugged their approval. Donnelly may be a threat to them, but he’s is an asset to the party and they know it.

For Martin, Donnelly’s acquisition strengthens one his most important messages – that the party has changed. Donnelly so-whatted when confronted with a long list of all the nasty things he said in the past about how Fianna Fáil wrecked the country.

Yes, he said them. But that was then. This is now. And the future is what counts. No wonder Micheál Martin was smiling.